AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	43. Making the African Suburbia
Paper ID	408
Author(s)	Dorman, W.J.
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	Peri-urban areas have figured significantly in the growth of contemporary Cairo (Egypt) since the 1950s. Whether measured in terms of population or housing stocks, half of the city is located on farmland subdivided not officially sanctioned for urbanization. Established outside the framework of state planning and regulation, such “informal” neighbourhoods have (not surprisingly) hence suffered from service deprivation and related pathologies. While not Sub-Saharan, the case of informal Cairo speaks to the concerns of the ‘African Suburbia’ panel. To begin with, it is a highly contested landscape characterized by struggles over control of land, disputes about the building of community and bottom-up challenges to the Egyptian state. Beginning in the late 1980s, some informal neighbourhoods sheltered the Islamist militants who attacked the Mubarak government in the early 1990s. These attacks triggered a crushing response from the Egyptian security forces and led to the stigmatization of informal Cairo in Egyptian public discourse. Such neighbourhoods were labelled ‘ashwa’iyyat (‘random’ or ‘haphazard’ areas) and depicted as a threat to Egypt’s physical, moral and political health. In the words of one Egyptian commentator, they were a ‘Hobbesian zone of vice and violence’. Yet the case of informal Cairo is far more complicated and problematic than this brief sketch suggests, and this complexity also falls within the panel’s remit. Much Egyptian public discourse has focused on the need to counter-act the ‘ashwa’iyyat, either by means of demolition or re-development. But such neighbourhoods have been remarkably resilient and the Egyptian state verycircumspect in its interventions, despite the considerable resources provided by external donors. Such resilience may, in part, be explained by informal Cairo’s origins in an organic social movement coming out of the ‘popular’ sectors of Egyptian society. Yet closer scrutiny suggests that informal neighbourhoods are not intrinsically different, with respect to their ways of living, from more established communities of the ‘popular’ type. Rather the durability of informal Cairo may be more effectively accounted for, by focusing on the neglectful governance of the Egyptian state and the structural constraints on its interventions. Generally short of resources, Egyptian governments have lacked the capacity to do much about informal Cairene neighbourhoods and, discourses of social pathology notwithstanding, their officials have tended to ignore them. Even when externally provided resources are available, the patrimonial character of contemporary Egyptian politics tends to preclude sustainable interventions and ultimately reproduces neglectful governance. Thus the resilience of informal Cairo can be better understood in terms of a politics of top-down state neglect rather than its inherent rebelliousness.

The Cairo 'Ashwa'iyyat: Between Islamist Insurgency & the Neglectful State